1. Description of the Related Art
Goods and services providers often employ various forms of marketing to drive consumer demand for products and services. Marketing includes various techniques to expose to target audiences to brands, products, services, and so forth. For example, marketing often includes providing promotions (e.g., advertisements) to an audience to encourage them to purchase a product or service. In some instances, promotions are provided through media outlets, such as television, radio, and the internet via television commercials, radio commercials and webpage advertisements. In the context of websites, marketing may provide advertisements for a website and products associated therewith to encourage persons to visit the website, use the website, purchase products and services offered via the website, or otherwise interact with the website.
Marketing promotions often require a large financial investment. A business may fund an advertisement campaign with the expectation that increases in revenue attributable to marketing promotions exceed the associated cost. A marketing campaign may be considered effective if it creates enough interest and/or revenue to offset the associated cost. Accordingly, marketers often desire to track the effectiveness of their marketing techniques generally, as well as the effectiveness of specific promotions. For example, a marketer may desire to know how many customers purchased a product as a result of a particular placement of an ad in a website.
In the context of internet advertising, tracking user interaction with a website is known as “web analytics.” Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views, as well as providing information about the behavior of users while they are viewing the site. Businesses desire to predict the future values of metrics that are compiled as a part of web analytics.
2. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to a system, method, and apparatus for predicting network activity with forecasting model selection.